ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Jack Dongarra never intended to work with computers. Initially, the Distinguished Professor at the University of Tennessee and founder of the Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL) thought he would be a high school science teacher. A chance internship at the Argonne National Laboratory kindled a lifelong interest in numerical methods and software--and, in particular, in linear algebra, which powered the development of Dongarra's groundbreaking techniques for optimizing operations on increasingly complex computer architectures. Your career in computing began serendipitously, with a semester-long internship at Argonne National Laboratory. As an undergraduate, I worked on EISPACK, a software package designed to solve eigenvalue problems.

As a young man, Jack Dongarra thought he would probably teach science to high school students. That was his plan when he enrolled at Chicago State College, which had become Chicago State University by the time he graduated in 1972. Over the course of his studies, he began to be fascinated by computers. In his senior year, physics professor Harvey Leff suggested he apply for an internship at nearby Argonne National Laboratory, where he could gain some computing experience. There, Dongarra joined a group developing EISPACK, a software library for calculating eigenvalues, components of linear algebra that are important to performing simulations of chemistry and physics.

Japan's arm-based Fugaku supercomputing system has been acknowledged as the world's most powerful supercomputer. In June 2020, the system earned the top spot in the Top500 ranking of the 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems on the planet, for its performance on a longstanding metric for massive scientific computation. Although modern supercomputing tasks often emphasize somewhat different capabilities, Fugaku also outperforms by other measures as well. This architecture just wins big time," said Torsten Hoefler of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. "It is a super-large step." Hoefler shared the 2019 ACM Gordon Bell Prize with an ETH Zurich team for simulations of heat and quantum electronic flow in nanoscale transistors performed in part on the previous Top500 leader, the Summit System at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee.